2 Compilers/interpreters

3 Tools for compilation

As some of the packages contain Unix/Linux specific scripts/commands, you need MinGW and MSYS to simulate a Unix environment. In some cases you need Cygwin instead. If you use msysgit on Windows already, all you need to do is add MinGW to your path.

If you need to link to C-software, define environment variable C_INCLUDE_PATH that lists the directories where the header files can be found, for example:

Set C_INCLUDE_PATH=C:\usr\local\include;C:\usr\local\include\SDL

(It is advisable to use paths without spaces, because some scripts in the MinGW/MSYS environment have problems with spaces in paths.)

For linking the libraries you need to define environment variable LIBRARY_PATH as well, listing the directories where .a and .lib files can be found. In case C++ software must be compiled, define CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH to list the directories with C++ header files.

GHCi: Using GHCi from a Win32 console is not everyones cup of tea. Using it from within shell mode in Emacs sucks a lot less - do 'M-x shell' in emacs, then type 'ghci'.

GHCi on Cygwin: When running GHC under a Cygwin shell on Windows, Ctrl-C sometimes doesn't work. A workaround is to use the rlwrap program to invoke GHCi : In addition to proper Ctrl-C, you also get emacs (or vi) key bindings and command history across sessions, which saves you a load of typing.

If a package depends (either directly or indirectly) on the unix package, you cannot compile it on Windows.

A simple way to see, if a package X depends on unix, is giving the command:

cabal install X --dry-run

This will list all packages that would be installed

If you are missing or need to distribute libraries with an application, the correct place to put them is *NOT* in \WINDOWS\System32 as once was the practice in the early days of Windows. All sane applications/installers keep their own private dependencies in the application directory. E.g., if the user has chosen to install your application to C:\Program Files\Foo then it is best to install any DLLs in the same location.

When compiling a program with GUI, use the compiler option -optl-mwindows to prevent a DOS-shell being displayed behind your GUI. (This passes the option -mwindows to the linker.)

Source files from Unix(-like) systems have lines terminated with Line Feed only; if your favorite editor cannot handle this, you can convert the files to MS-DOS format with the unix2dos command (from the mingw-utils package). For more information, give command: unix2dos --help

Note, that GHC can handle source files in Unix format.

To convert a set of files to MS-DOS format (note: this might damage binary files):

C:\MSYS\1.0\bin\find . -type f -exec unix2dos {} ;

Note: the find command included in MSYS is different from the MS-DOS find command, therefore, you need to specify the entire path to this command.

6 Binary downloads

6.1 Haskell

Below a list of binary packages for Windows. To be sure you get the last version of each, it is best to download the source from Hackage and compile (except for the Haskell Platform).